Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson, in his career-detonating interview with GQ, gave a rather thoughtful vernacular exegesis of the Bible’s line on sin, while carefully insisting that he and other Christians are obligated to love all sinners and leave it to the Almighty to adjudicate the competing charms of drunkards, fornicators, and homosexuals. Nevertheless, GLAAD “the gatekeepers of politically correct gayness” as the (gay) novelist Bret Easton Ellis sneered saw their opportunity and seized it. By taking out TV’s leading cable star, they would teach an important lesson pour encourager les autres that espousing conventional Christian morality, even off-air, is incompatible with American celebrity.
Some of my comrades, who really should know better, wonder why, instead of insisting Robertson be defenestrated, GLAAD wouldn’t rather “start a conversation.” But, if you don’t need to, why bother? Most Christian opponents of gay marriage oppose gay marriage; they don’t oppose the right of gays to advocate it. Yet thug groups like GLAAD increasingly oppose the right of Christians even to argue their corner. It’s quicker and more effective to silence them.
As Christian bakers ordered to provide wedding cakes for gay nuptials and many others well understand, America’s much-vaunted “freedom of religion” is dwindling down to something you can exercise behind closed doors in the privacy of your own abode or at a specialist venue for those of such tastes for an hour or so on Sunday morning, but when you enter the public square you have to leave your faith back home hanging in the closet. Yet even this reductive consolation is not permitted to Robertson: GLAAD spokesgay Wilson Cruz declared that “Phil and his family claim to be Christian, but Phil’s lies about an entire community fly in the face of what true Christians believe.” Robertson was quoting the New Testament, but hey, what do those guys know? In today’s America, land of the Obamacare Pajama Boy, Jesus is basically Nightshirt Boy, a fey non-judgmental dweeb who’s cool with whatever. What GLAAD is attempting would be called, were it applied to any other identity group, “cultural appropriation.”
In the broader sense, it’s totalitarian.

If Robertson were the hapless hick he was intended to be, he probably could quote controversial Bible passages without getting the boot. But viewers like him, and GLAAD can’t allow Americans to like a homophobe. He is in the rare position of being an entertainer who was fired for being too popular.
It’s more than that, though. Phil Robertson was fired because the overlords of liberal media can’t handle the idea that a professional funny man might come out of the back woods of Louisiana with a long, unkempt beard and a shotgun. It’s ridiculous to them to suppose that he could be deserving of the same license that they extend to the much-ballyhooed “creative class.” In dozens of denunciations on Robertson’s “coarse, offensive” remarks on sexuality, almost nobody notes the obviously relevant fact that Robertson is a humorist.
This controversy is as much about anti-redneck prejudice as it is about anti-Christian prejudice. America shouldn’t stand for an entertainment industry that permits and perpetuates this kind of bigotry.

Why Sacco?
Why did BuzzFeed and others gin up a journalistic assassination squad to hit some nobody named Justine Sacco?
If you'll pardon the mixing of metaphors, why was this private citizen plucked from obscurity by The Online Statsi for a trip to Room 101?
What we have seen happen to public figures, like "Duck Dynasty's" Phil Robertson, who dare offend the political/media left-wing elite is frightening enough. Is this group now so addicted to the taste of bloody scalps that no one is safe -- that any obscure citizen with only 174 Twitter followers can have their social media door broken into and lives ruined by the likes of BuzzFeed: Speech Detectives?

The sixties radicals were once culturally disfavored and so championed the maximum possible freedom of thought and expression. But they're not culturally disfavored anymore -- thanks to Gramsci's long march through the institutions, they are the culture.
And so now it doesn't appear quite so important that people be permitted a large zone of free movement in the sphere of thought, belief, and speech.
Now the Cultural Deciders -- like Mayor Bloomberg -- understand that to the extent people will be compelled to speak, think, believe and feel a certain way, they'll be compelled to speak, think, believe and feel the same way as the Cultural Deciders themselves, and what's wrong with that?

Or, as Instapundit put it, the Left abandoned free speech when They no longer needed “an ostensibly-neutral ideal to shelter communists anymore.”

Nolte and Ace deserve credit for fighting the good fight against the Twitter mob.

Stephen Koch on the essence of totalitarian power:

An essential tenet of the NKVD was that the system needed the arrest, torture, and death of thoroughly obedient-- therefore 'innocent'-- people, since without random terror, the innocent would never be afraid, and (even ideologically) the Soviet state was made coherent by fear. From this perspective, some of the motiveless malignity falls into place.
Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas against the West

Donald Rayfield,:

Chekisty and poets were drawn to each other like stoats and rabbits-- often with fatal consequences for the latter. The found common ground: the need for fame, an image of themselves as crusaders, creative frustration, membership of a vanguard, scorn for the bourgeosie, an inability to discuss their work with common mortals. There was an easily bridged gap between between the symbolist poet who aimed to epater le bourgeois and the checkist who stood the bourgeois up against the wall.
Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

I think Tom Wolfe gave the best explanation for the mob action against Justine Sacco:

From the outset the eminence of this new creature, the intellectual, who was to play such a tremendous role in the history of the twentieth century, was inseperable from his necessary indignation. It was his indignation that elevated him to a plateau of moral superiority. Once up there, he was in a position to look down on the rest of humanity. And it did not cost him any effort, intellectual or otherwise. As Marshall McLuhan would put it years later: 'Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.'Hooking Up

I’m just amused at how quickly after the implementation of ObamaCare the whole “death panel” thing was transformed from a paranoid fantasy of that yokel, Sarah Palin, to an obviously good idea that all thinking people support.

On Nov. 6, amid the kind of hype not seen since Michael Jackson floated a statue of himself down the Thames River, Lady Gaga released her third studio album, “ARTPOP.”
And not since Jackson has such a globally famous, white-hot pop star had such a rise and precipitous fall: “ARTPOP” is on track to lose $25 million for her label, Interscope, prompting ­rumors of imminent layoffs.
But it’s not just album sales. When Gaga opened this year’s MTV Video Music Awards, her performance was eclipsed by the twerking Miley Cyrus. Gaga’s work as both host and performer on a recent “Saturday Night Live” was underwhelming, and her recent ABC special, “Lady Gaga and The Muppets’ Holiday Spectacular,” had a dismal 0.9 rating among viewers ages 18 to 49, with just 3.6 million viewers total.

For those keeping score, that means the average episode of Duck Dynasty has three times the audience of the much hyped Lady Gaga special.

I am intrigued by this:

Just five years ago, Lady Gaga exploded on the scene with her debut album, “The Fame.” She had an invented backstory as an art-school freak (in reality, she was a rich private-school graduate from the Upper West Side)

I’m not surprised that the biography was created out of whole cloth. That is just part of the star-making machinery in a decadent age. Rather, I’m intrigued about the journalistic decision-making that turns hype into “buzz.”

When does the crusty editor tell the reporter to confirm the facts in the PR handout? And when do they just decide to run the legend and promote the story the PR people created?

CIA, Russian privatization, Hay-Adams hotel kitty-corner from the White House, Chechens ... the full story behind how the Tsarnaevs got to live in America seems like it would pretty interesting if it ever comes out. But, few others find the topic interesting

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Our own confidential donor list was illegally leaked by the IRS last year and wound up in the hands of the Texas Observer, a far-left statewide magazine, which promptly published it. It’s no surprise, then, that the Guardian shared its SPN documents with the Observer last week for dissemination in Texas, just as it did for the Portland Press Herald in Maine.

FBI agents have established that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of President Nixon's re-election and directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Re-election of the President.
The activities, according to information in FBI and Department of Justice files, were aimed at all the major Democratic presidential contenders and -- since 1971 -- represented a basic strategy of the Nixon re-election effort.

It was this story which prompted Walter Cronkite to devote two broadcasts of the Evening News to the Watergate. The Post’s “roadmap” of scandal also inspired Judge John Sirica to pass out heavy sentences to the Watergate burglars to break the coverup he believed took place in his court room.

Three things stand out about the Woodward and Bernstein story. First, they got a lot of stuff wrong. They jumped on a false trail of dirty tricks and “fifty Segrettis” that had almost nothing to do with the Watergate break-in and cover-up. (See here).

Second, most of the dirty tricks alleged in the story were just that: political pranks carried to the level of misdemeanors.

Finally, most of the illegal and immoral actions at the heart of Watergate were carried out the Nixon campaign: i. e. private citizens with no legal power nor any special protections.

With the IRS scandals we have something far, far worse. Here are government employees breaking the law and wielding their enormous power on behalf of one political party. Further, we have the incontrovertible fact that the party which benefited from this abuse of power has obstructed any and all attempts to ascertain the scope of the abuse and to punish those who did wrong, covered for the wrong-doers, or were negligent in preventing the wrong-doing.

Perhaps worst of all, we have a media which is unconcerned with this scandal.

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Perhaps most disturbing is that many in the mainstream media not just left-wing outlets like the Guardian not only approve of this kind of intimidation, but are willing to engage in it. The Chicago Sun-Times recently rejected an op-ed submitted by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy because the group would not cave to demands from the newspaper to disclose its donor list. The Sun-Times then ran an editorial explaining that it wished it could “draw a red line” and reject all letters and op-eds from nonprofits that do not disclose their donors, and never use them as sources. The editors admitted that “highly credible organizations” like the ACLU and the NAACP also refuse to disclose their donor lists, but nevertheless claimed that groups like the Mackinac Center should be held to a “more skeptical standard,” because they haven’t been around as long and, presumably, because they buck the liberal consensus.
The editors of the Sun-Times, like others driving the campaign against conservative nonprofits, claim a benign desire to inform the public about the financing of groups that might influence public policy. But if that’s true, where are the calls for the private donor lists of the Center for American Progress, the New America Foundation, the Center for Media and Democracy, and other left-leaning groups?

RTWT It's a fairly shocking account how are modern Journolists pursue their political agenda under the rubric of "investigative reporting" and do so by winking at egregious abuses of power by government employees.

It’s also typical of the “banal authoritarianism of do-something punditry,” of which Brooks is a leading practitioner, that the idea of gridlock horrifies him more than extending the imbalance of power among the three branches.

Tom Friedman has long been an admirer of China's version of democracy, which is to not have a democracy.
Yesterday David Brooks moved outside his comfort zone of evaluating the crispness of trouser creases to opine it's time to Yield more authority to the President.

The Christmas season must be difficult for Times columnists. Apparently holiday fatigue and excess eggnog lead to bad outcomes. Any column by Maureen Dowd could be offered as evidence but this latest laugher from David Brooks reveals a man in need of a few weeks away

In the twentieth century journalism was provided by insular news organizations that rarely cooperated with other news organizations, detached themselves from the society they claimed to serve, and often relied on news and information clues from elites and official sources. New, more flexible means of obtaining and providing news are emerging in the deinstitutionalized environment that rely on public accounts and data previously unavailable to journalists. Where these are taking us remains to be seen.

HHS has pretty clearly escaped the rule of law and entered a world of corporatist haggling, where political leaders and a few big industry types sit around the table and work everything out. True, they have a mutual interest in doing so–Obama needs Obamacare to work, insurers are counting on it working well enough to make them money. The interests aren’t symmetrical though—at some point, long before Obamans give up on Obamacare, insurance companies could decide to cut their losses, bail, and go make money somewhere else. That gives HHS a motive to make sure they get enough money to keep them in the game: ‘Don’t worry, we’ll make it up to you later.’ This is a policy best announced at a small table in a noisy restaurant, not in the semi-judicial proceedings required for formal rulemaking under the Administrative Procedure Act.

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

I doubt that there is any conservative organization that can boast a remotely comparable list of corporate supporters. CAP’s disclosure is a timely reminder that large corporations are not, in general, supporters of free enterprise. Many of them love to partner with government to suppress innovation and competition. Koch Industries stands alone, as far as I know, as a relatively large company that actually supports free enterprise as a matter of principle. Which is why corporatist America, through disreputable organizations like the Center for American Progress, has waged unremitting warfare against Koch.

A joke in those days concerned a bragging Texan touring Italy and claiming that each of its sights was smaller than something in his native state. His guide showed him the erupting Vesuvius and said, “You don’t have anything like that in Texas, do you?” to which he replied, “Well, no, but we got a fire department in Dallas that could put that sumbitch out inside of ten minutes.”

Sunday, December 15, 2013

Of course, it had to be "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan."

But not so fast. Patterico notes that Politfact has waffled on this question for three years which raises an important question:

So, yes, PolitiFact, you got this one right, now — and if you had chosen any other statement it would have been outrageous. BUT . . . you completely blew this before. And so the question is: why on God’s green Earth should anybody ever listen to you again or care what you have to say, when you totally blew the call multiple times on a lie this huge?

I thought that the "media critics" on Fox, CNN, and NPR might discuss how the MSM could let a pernicious and dangerous lie go unchallenged for years. So i checked out "On the Media", "Reliable Sources", and "Media Buzz".

Guess what.... none of them covered it.

I'm not surprised that OTM decided to run a bunch a fluff to protect their boyfriend in the Oval Office. That is par for the course. Nor did i expect much from CNN. (It was interesting that CNN had time to join in the Megyn Kelly bashing but no time for a story of huge importance to the nation and the craft of journalism.)

But come on, shouldn't Fox News care about this sort of thing?

In an odd way, Howard Kurtz's move from CNN to FNC has made each network more liberal.

The MSM, which typically holds itself out to be objective, knows better. But when you’ve got a hard left agenda to push and/or a readership you hope to keep in the cocoon, straight reporting quickly goes out the door.

You know, when we stop to think about all the progress America has made toward ensuring that the marginalized get equal access to financial ruin, we shouldn't forget that it's unsung individuals like Donald Trump, Steve Wynn, and Sheldon Adelson who are some of the real heroes.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

It is a cultural fact of life that such culturally pre-approved taboo-breakers as Miss Silverman must have impeccably liberal credentials, and she has been as slavish a devotee of the Democratic cause generally and the cause of Barack Obama in particular as one is likely to find outside the pages of the New York Times. She organized something called The Great Schlep, aimed at recruiting young Jews to persuade their Florida-dwelling elders to help deliver that key electoral state to him in his presidential contest. She makes get-out-the-vote videos that are in practice get-out-the-vote-for-Obama videos, and has a habit of saying dumb and uninformed things about subjects such as population growth. (Malthus deserves better representatives.) Given that liberals have taken to deriving their political views from comedians as a general practice (Ahoy, Jon Stewart! Greetings, Bill Maher!), Sarah Silverman, whose politics are as crass as her sense of humor, is a perfect cultural fit for the Age of Obama.

But it's not far less than astounding that with a 28-24 lead in the fourth quarter, on a snow-covered field, the Steelers' play-calls went, pass, pass, pass, pass, run, pass on one possession. Then pass, run, pass, pass, pass on a second.
That's against a Miami defense ranked 25th against the run.
These are matters Dan Rooney and Art Rooney II have plenty of time to analyze between here and next September, as nothing looms urgently in between.

But does it matter if Black Friday fades if the shopping season gets peanut-buttered around over several other days? I think it does. One side effect of all of this discount jockeying is that customers lose a call to action. In past years, shoppers could be confident that Black Friday deals were likely to be the best of the season. But this isn’t the case anymore. Dire discounts and once-taboo discussions over how early to open on Thanksgiving revealed that retailers are hungry. Rather than marking the starting point of the shopping season and the best deals of the year, this year Black Friday marked a “meh” sort of midpoint to a season that many consumers believe will yield better discounts by year-end.
Will retailers change their ways after learning this year that more is not better? Probably not. Retailers are now stuck in a discounting prisoner’s dilemma. It’s in the best interests of retailers to return to the practice of making Black Friday weekend a once a year blow-out event that provides the best discounts and generates purchase-propelling excitement. However, each retailer also has an incentive to “cheat” by offering discounts in advance.

Obamacare’s navigators are probably the least reported scandal that was built into Obama’s signature law. Democrats set up part of the law to basically keep liberal activists paid between election cycles., through the “navigator” program. Navigators are groups that ostensibly help Americans get health coverage but in many cases they’re really holdovers from the Obama 2012 campaign. Or they’re ACORN-style agitators. Or they’re unvetted groups that hire felons — to handle Americans’ personal information. The navigators are several scandals just waiting to happen.

Wednesday, December 04, 2013

Today, marketers are just as likely to target people simply because they are young -- even though they have no money and cannot and will not buy their products .
Conversely, they are just as likely to ignore people who are old -- even though they have lots of money and are prime targets for their products.
As I wrote recently, automobile marketers continue their idiotic habit of targeting people 18-34 for "youth cars" despite the fact that 88% of the people who buy these cars are over 35.
Almost everyone you see in a car commercial is between the ages of 18 and 24. And yet, people 75 to dead buy five times as many new cars as people 18 to 24.
In fact, marketers are more likely than ever to ignore and insult the people who can actually buy their products and grow their businesses.
Marketers contempt for and prejudice against older people is a remarkable and fascinating story. They have volumes of data that tell them about the size and power of the over 50 market, but because of their hard-wired prejudices they are blind to it.

The self-referencing “professionals” in the advertising industry overvalue people like themselves--young, urban, single, childless, iconoclastic. They undervalue those who are different. Advertising spending is shaped by this prejudice. Marketers believe that commercials have to target young, hip influentials while older suburban consumers are a lost cause.
Newspapers and broadcast television are penalized because their readers/viewers are discounted. Agencies expect to pay less to reach an older audience.
There is very little hard data to bolster this advertising conceit. It makes sense for newspapers to attack this idea and demonstrate that their print readership is a valuable target market for a vast array of products.
They cannot expect the advertising industry to do it for them. That runs counter to the industry’s self-image. Further, it would also reveal the fact that the typical agency is a one-trick pony that hasa no idea how to reach people over 40.

In the early 1930s at Quantico Virginia, Fleet Marine Force leaders began to work on the problems of conducting amphibious offensives, which they found required new combat techniques and a high degree of combined-arms coordination, as well as special landing craft and weapons. The Tarawa invasion of November 1943 showed that Nimitz's navy and marine forces still had much to learn, but by the time of of their assaults on the Mariana's the next summer they had mastered the intricacies of amphibious warfare.

D. Clayton James, "American and Japanese Strategies in the Pacific War," Makers of Modern Strategy

This did not happen by accident. Col. Joseph Alexander notes that the commitment to learning the right lessons quickly came from the very top:

Before leaving reeking Betio, Nimitz ordered the preparation of engineering drawings of the Japanese fortifications on a priority basis.

Within a few weeks, the navy had built exact replicas of the defenses and started to work improving on improving the fire support tactics and weapons. In addition, 2d Marines produced fourteen reports on lessons learned. The first was submitted on 27 December and the last on 13 January 1944.

Unfortunately, the US Army did not possess the same eagerness to learn from the experience of Tarawa.

"The one marked weakness among the top Allied officers lay in the commander of American ground forces, General Omar Bradley. Bradley was an unimaginative and uninspiring commander, who had already proven to possess a streak of jealousy for subordinates more competent than he was. In addition, he was an Anglophobe who exacerbated tensions with the British."

James Lacey and Williamson Murray, Moment of Battle: The Twenty Clashes That Changed the World

Even worse, Bradley, who had no experience with amphibious landings, did not take advice from officers who had seen service in the Pacific. Moreover, he disliked the Navy and was uninterested in their work on fire support and ship to shore movements under enemy fire. At Tarawa the Marines learned that amphibian tractors were worth their weight in gold. Bradley left 300 amtracs in England. Nor did Bradley see the value in the specialized engineering vehicles developed by Gen. Sir Percy Hobart to overcome the extraordinary challenges presented by the German beach defenses.

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"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." --Samuel Adams